Even the best websites need a redesign after a while. A website redesign is an excellent opportunity to enhance user experience, adopt new web design standards, and ensure your site aligns with your brand and message.
However, it's essential not to ignore your current search engine optimization (SEO) during a redesign. Building good SEO takes time, and a poorly designed redesign can harm your hard-earned search engine rankings.
Here are some key steps to protect your SEO during your website relaunch. It will help keep your site visible and competitive in search results. Whether you’re making a few updates or completely changing your site, our guide and tips for website redesign can help maintain your online presence and keep your traffic steady. In this article, we’ll cover:
Why Should Your Website Undergo a Redesign?
What Are the Benefits of a Website Redesign?
How Does a Website Redesign Affect SEO?
SEO Website Redesign Tips
Web design trends and user expectations change quickly. A website that seemed modern five years ago might now look old-fashioned. It can lead users to think that your content hasn't been updated either.
Redesigning your website helps you stay up-to-date, relevant, and competitive. Here are some key reasons why you might need to redesign your website:
Outdated Design: A modern, attractive website can engage users and build trust. Even the best designs can look outdated over time, making your brand seem less innovative and trustworthy. Regularly updating your design helps your website stay current, which can attract and keep visitors by creating a good first impression.
Poor User Experience (UX): Enhancing navigation, load times, and mobile responsiveness can significantly improve user satisfaction. Today’s users expect fast, easy-to-use websites that work well on their mobile devices. Any issues can drive them away. User experience improvements help visitors easily navigate your site and find what they need on any device.
Rebranding: If your business is undergoing a rebrand, your website should reflect your new identity. Consistency across all platforms is essential for building a strong brand presence. A redesign enables you to incorporate new logos, color schemes, messaging, and brand voice into your website. It ensures that your site aligns with your updated brand strategy and conveys your new identity.
New Features and Technologies: Utilizing the latest web technologies can enhance your website's functionality and increase user engagement. By adding new tools and features, you can boost your website's performance. Adding features like chatbots, interactive elements, and enhanced security can create a more engaging and secure experience for your visitors.
Redesigning your website helps your brand in ways that extend beyond its appearance. By following your website redesign checklist, you can expect benefits such as:
A well-designed website helps visitors easily find what they need. Good website design keeps people engaged and lowers bounce rates.
Modern designs with interactive features can capture visitors' attention and keep them engaged on your site for longer. It helps users to make purchases, book appointments, or reach out for more information about your business.
Improving your website's performance is essential. You can achieve this by optimizing your code, images, and load times, as well as by integrating applications. These changes can keep users engaged and encourage them to stay on your site.
More people are using smartphones and mobile devices to access the Internet than ever before. Because of this, websites need to be designed for smaller screens. Ensuring your site functions properly on mobile devices is crucial.
A redesign allows you to use the latest SEO techniques when relaunching your website. It can improve your search engine rankings, enhance your visibility, and increase traffic to your site.
A website redesign can significantly affect your SEO, both positively and negatively. This is why it’s essential to include SEO in your website redesign checklist.
You can redesign your website without losing your SEO ranking by maintaining your existing strategy or making adjustments as needed. Here are the key areas that can influence SEO during a website redesign:
URL Structure Changes: Changing your URL structure without implementing proper redirects can result in 404 errors and a loss of link equity. It means that both search engines and users will encounter broken links, which can negatively impact your search rankings and user experience. To avoid this, use 301 redirects to ensure you preserve and transfer your SEO value to the new URLs.
Content Changes: Changing or removing content can cause you to lose essential keywords and indexed pages. Search engines depend on relevant content to rank your pages, so making significant changes can hurt your rankings. It’s critical to identify which content performs well and either keep it or redirect it to maintain its SEO value.
Technical SEO: The design of your website, how fast it loads, and whether it works well on mobile devices can significantly affect your SEO performance. Making your site quicker and mobile-friendly can enhance user experience and improve your rankings, as search engines favor websites that are quick and mobile-optimized. If you encounter technical issues during an SEO website redesign, such as slow loading times or a poor mobile layout, it can negatively impact your SEO.
Metadata Updates: Modifying meta tags without optimizing them can negatively impact your search rankings. Meta titles and descriptions are essential for how search engines understand and show your content. To maintain and improve your SEO, it is necessary to optimize these elements with relevant keywords and provide an accurate description of your content.
Internal Linking: Enhancing your site's internal linking can improve search engine crawling and indexing of your pages. Search engines use these links to understand how your pages are organized and which ones are most important. Maintaining a clear and SEO-friendly internal linking structure helps search engines perform their job more effectively, which can aid in keeping your rankings.
When redesigning your website, it's essential to have an SEO checklist that encompasses these key factors. This checklist helps you track the impact of your changes on your SEO and search engine rankings.
Redesigning your website doesn't have to hurt your existing SEO. To maintain or improve your SEO during the redesign, follow these simple tips. Add these to your SEO checklist for the website redesign.
Before redesigning your website, conduct a comprehensive SEO audit. It will help you understand how your site is currently performing and identify areas for improvement. The audit will reveal which pages generate the most traffic and which keywords are the most valuable. Knowing your SEO strengths and weaknesses will help you make informed decisions.
Keep your current URL structure as much as you can. Changing URLs can break links and lower your page's authority, potentially negatively impacting your search rankings. If you must make changes, Ken Romero, Thrive’s Demand Gen SEO Strategist, suggests using 301 redirects to keep your SEO authority. It helps guide both users and search engines to the right pages, preserving link equity and reducing disruptions.
Optimize your new content for keywords that matter and match what users are searching for. Keep your best content and integrate it into the new design so it retains its SEO value. Create all new content carefully, following SEO best practices, such as using relevant keywords, headings, and internal links, to enhance your visibility in search engines.
Keep your existing meta titles, descriptions, and headers. These elements are essential for how search engines understand and rank your pages. If you are rebranding, update them to reflect your new brand identity. Make changes where needed, but ensure they remain SEO-friendly by including relevant keywords and accurately representing the content on each page.
You can make your site load faster by optimizing images, using browser caching, and reducing JavaScript. A faster site helps improve your search engine rankings and provides a better user experience, which can lead to lower bounce rates. Focus on these performance improvements while redesigning your site, and you'll boost both your SEO and user satisfaction.
Utilize responsive design techniques to ensure your site functions optimally on all devices. As more people use mobile phones to access websites, having a mobile-friendly site is crucial for SEO. Responsive design automatically adjusts to different screen sizes, providing a consistent and good user experience across all devices.
Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website’s performance before, during, and after the redesign. These tools provide valuable insights into traffic patterns, user behavior, and potential issues. By regularly reviewing your analytics, you can identify and address any SEO issues that arise during the redesign.
Before you go live, test your redesigned site for broken links, missing pages, and other issues. Checking for these problems is crucial to identify and correct errors before they impact users and negatively affect search engine rankings. This step is critical in ensuring a seamless transition and safeguarding your SEO.
A website redesign can refresh your online presence, but it's essential to protect your SEO carefully. By following our website redesign guide and keeping key SEO elements in mind, you can make sure your redesign improves your search engine rankings instead of harming them.
If you want to learn how to redesign your website without losing SEO, Thrive’s digital marketing agency is here to help. We can manage every part of your website redesign. If you’re considering rebranding or updating your site and want to maintain your current SEO, we offer a website redesign guide and an SEO checklist to help optimize your plans.
Contact us today to discuss your project. We'll help you ensure a smooth transition for your SEO during your website relaunch and redesign.